Showing results by narrator "Anna Fields" in All Categories

Madame de Treymes follows the fortunes of two innocents abroad: Fanny Frisbee of New York, unhappily married to the dissolute Marquis de Malrive, scion of a great house of the Faubourg St. Germain, and John Durham, her childhood friend, who arrives in Paris intent on persuading Fanny to divorce her husband and marry him instead.

The mystery of how a wealthy New York socialite became a major American novelist is brilliantly explored in this fascinating critical biography, widely considered to be the most perceptive introduction to Edith Wharton's life and work.

No one knows better than Sally Quinn how to make parties work. She has thrown some of the most talked-about parties and has attended most of the others. Here, she turns her trademark sharp wit on the Washington social scene and offers an irreverent look at what goes on at the parties you read about in the columns. From seating debacles to real-life scandals, she reveals her firsthand experiences as a member of the Washington power elite to illustrate how to entertain for any occasion.

L. Frank Baum's sequel to The Wizard of Oz is a delightful account of the further adventures of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman and their strange experiences of the Highly Magnified Woggle-Bug, Jack Pumkinhead, the Animated Saw-Horse and the Gump.

Nearly three million Jews came to America from Eastern Europe between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I. Filled with the hope of life in a new land, most were young, single, uneducated, and unskilled. Many were children or teens. They were, in a sense, unfinished citizens of either the old or the new world.

Egypt's long history has no more mysterious reign than that of Akhenaton, disciple of the One God, the Aten. Akhenaton abolished the worship of all other gods in Egypt and built a city devoted to the Aten, ruling for a decade of increasing civil unrest. Without a son of his own, he was forced to accept his brother, Smenkhkare, as co-pharaoh. The story unfolds through the eyes of Nofret, a slave girl, who comes to know more of the king and of his city than most.

Of Charles Dickens, Jane Smiley says that "his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels". Smiley's Charles Dickens is at once a sensitive profile of the great master and a fascinating meditation on the writing life. Smiley evokes Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporaries: convivial, astute, boundlessly energetic, and lionized.

Recovering from the death of her son and the end of her marriage, Kelsey Stewart goes to stay with her aunt at her seaside inn in Carmel, California, looking only for retreat. But a local emergency unexpectedly brings Kelsey's troubled heart back to life again. When a young boy falls from one of the sea cliffs, Kelsey, a therapist specializing in brain-damaged children, is recruited to help rehabilitated Jody.

Texas-based crime reporter Molly Cates has just published her first book, describing the blood-curdling exploits of serial killer Louie Bronk. Now on death row, Louie's sentence is about to be carried out. Molly will be there as a witness, and she wants to write about it--the final coda to Louie's story. But suddenly, she's being strongly discouraged by her boss at the Lone Star Monthly and by Charlie McFarland, the millionaire real estate developer whose first wife, Tiny, was Bronk's most famous victim.

Despite her misgivings, child psychologist Lynn McLeod can't ignore the plea to help 10-year-old Jilly Asche, the daughter of her ex-husband, Stephen. But immediately upon her return to Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, Lynn is drawn subtly into the lives of everyone in the secluded household: Stephen, now an enigmatic stranger; Julian, a mesmerizing family friend who challenges Lynn's ideas of life and death; and Jilly, the beautiful lost child burdened by a terrifying and deadly secret.

When crime reporter Molly Cates’s father died more than twenty-five years ago, the case was ruled a suicide, and Molly’s efforts to prove otherwise led to nothing but anguish and the breakup of her family. But now new information has come her way and she reopens the investigation–and a rush of old wounds–with a vengeance. Soon the personal becomes dangerously political as Molly’s search for the truth leads her from the stately halls of Texas government to the mean streets of Austin’s down-and-out–and ultimately to a moral dilemma she never could have anticipated.

In rural Turkey, Meryem is raped by her uncle. Outcast for shaming her family, she is expected to kill herself. Her commando cousin instead tells her he will take her to Istanbul. By chance, they meet Irfan, a celebrity professor who has left his wife, and the three embark on a journey that shows what unexpected things can happen in the space between wounded people.

Full of frontline tales of Southwest's innovative management style, this compelling book explains how Southwest's relentless focus on high-performance relationships and its people-management practices have been the key to its unparalleled success in the airline industry. It reveals how any organization willing to invest the time and effort can learn from Southwest's management style by creating shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect among management, employees, and suppliers.

A deceased scientist's telepathy experiments have been taken over by his unscrupulous assistant. A group determined to stop him is drawn into a web of intrigue involving Senate files, counterfeit money, gambling casinos, and the Secret Service.

Here's a compulsively listenable, hilarious novel told through the e-mail messages of Martin Lukes. Martin Lukes is a man who is good at taking credit where it isn't due; a man who works hard at personal growth but consistently lets down everyone around him; a man who communicates with his sons by e-mail and fails to notice how smart his wife, Jenny, really is; a man - in short - who loves jargon but totally lacks understanding.

Monica Ali's stunning second book is a collection of stories, set in the Alentejo province of Portugal, linked by characters and by a vivid sense of place and time. Teresa, a beautiful young girl from the village, is supposed to marry a suitable man from the same community, but she wants to see the world. Vasco is a café owner who is losing business to the new Internet café down the road.

To succeed in business today, you must be strong, smart, competitive, resilient, tenacious, and fearless. If you want to be heard at work, you must speak up. If you want to drive change, you need an action plan. If you want to keep your job in an increasingly competitive world, you must show on a daily basis how you add value to your company. In short, if you want to succeed, you need good, old-fashioned backbone.

In their second book on our current White House occupant, Ivins and Dubose take the wire brush to the Bush presidency and show how he has applied the same flawed strategies he used in governing Texas to running the largest superpower in the world.

Two nuns are brutally attacked within the walls of their convent. There seems to be no shred of motive. But during the autopsy Forensic Pathologist Maura Isles discovers something entirely unexpected. And when a second heavily mutilated body is found and linked to the case, she and Detective Jane Rizzoli find themselves in the midst of a terrifying investigation that seems to implicate everyone. Because who can really say they’re free from sin?

Monica Crowley served as a personal assistant to former president Richard M. Nixon from July 1990 until his death in April 1994. This remarkable story of his final public and private years is based on full reconstructions of the conversations she had with him at the time.